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The Wisdom of Foolishness

When Martin Hellman started working in cryptography in the early 1970s, his colleagues told him he was crazy to do so; he couldn’t possibly compete with the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA) and its enormous budget. He was also warned that if he did succeed in accomplishing something significant, the NSA would classify it. Those arguments had validity, Hellman says, but the co-inventor of public key cryptography thinks it was wise to take on that “fool’s errand.” This talk explores several such “tiltings at windmills” that turned out well.